Today’s strip was not available for preview, so we’ll all just have to wait for midnight Eastern time to see how Cliff’s hallucinations of Sam Spade prove Brinkel’s innocence or something.

In lieu of this Brinkel nonsense, let’s hop back 23 years to this very day, the last time a Funky Winkerbean character attempted to solve a celebrity murder.

The summer of 1996 was a busy one in the Batiukverse. Lisa was badly injured when talk radio caused the Westview Post Office bombing and Les was busy working on his first book, the eventual Fallen Star, where a fictional detective (surely not Sam Spade?) solved John Darling’s murder.

The interviewee here is Wade Wallace (he eventually became Funky’s AAsponsor) and Les didn’t even seek him out for this interview. Nope, this exchange happened because Funky, Les, and Lisa caught him running an ongoing scam where he would call and order a pizza, not pick it up, and then fish it out of the Montoni’s dumpster when Funky threw it out… y’know, because he was homeless. In fact, he likely had been homeless for a nearly 2 decades at this point, as his homelessness was used to set up a vanity gag in a December 1979 John Darling strip. Act II was a maudlin mess.

Wallace returned later in the summer to return a publisher’s check to Les, which he found because Les accidentally threw it out like an idiot. Les spends three strips in a dumpster looking for the check, which is a real highlight in Batiukverse history.

You know, a strip by Billy The Skink would be interesting, consistent, and well worth following. And the comments would be great, because they’d discuss the various threads and alleys that were sparked by the strip, since the strip would be really rich in content.

I could say the same, of course, about strips authored by TFHackett, Epicus Doomus (the most “of course” of them all), Charles, Comic Book Harriet…in fact, everyone who posts here regularly could make a way more entertaining strip than Mr Gotta Get To That 50th.

(Apologies to those faithful snarkers I haven’t named, you know who you are and you know I’d have included you.)

“Not exactly”? Not in any way, shape or form, unless Hammett somehow wrote a novel where Sam Spade proved Butter was innocent, and nobody ever read the novel but Cliff for some dumb reason. Which I am totally expecting to turn out to be the case.

As usual his idiotic premise is pretty much writing itself when bang, all of a sudden right out of nowhere he opts to tap an already-dry well yet again for no other reason aside from indulging his increasingly warped early 20th century nostalgic yearnings. Dashiell Hammett my ass. If he f*cks this all up and we don’t see Zanzibar again I will go apeshit on his hack ass, you can bet on that.

Special thanks to billy for another walk down Act II memory lane. If you didn’t read FW Act II, no description could possibly do it justice. Just try to imagine prestige arcs, hundreds and hundreds of them, week after week, month after month, year after year. That was back when BatHack would “address” a dozen “social issues” before lunch and still have ten more in the can. FW was annoying and stupid in a whole different way back then, plus the execrable Lisa was still alive. Shudder.

“Well, not Sam Spade, exactly…You know that me and Butter were shipmates on the tramp steamer, “Mary Celeste”. Butter swore that when we got to Zanzibar, he was gonna buy the biggest chimp he could find and teach him to smoke and shoot, and by Gar, that’s just what he did!

“That chimp was damn smart! He got so bored shooting beer cans off Butter’s guests’ heads for cigarette tips, that he started solving mysteries in his spare time. Butter even bought him a trench coat, fedora, and a shoulder holster. After he busted some penny-ante hoods, damned if he didn’t solve the Black Dahlia murder! Than he found the real killer of the Lindbergh baby!

“After that he was insufferable. Inspector Zanzibar (that’s how he insisted on being addressed) would only smoke Gauloises, and he started “missing” his shots, shooting Butter’s friends in the foot or ass.

“Anyways, he told me that somebody at the costume party wearing a fedora, trench coat, and a gorilla mask shot Valerie Pond. Then we went on a date with two starlets and damned if he didn’t bang them both!”

Man Batty’s a maverick, taking on talk radio like that. I mean who hasn’t listened to NPR and then wanted to go commit a violent act…oh wait..

And then those poor tv anchors, they get old, and bam, they are on the street. That’s TV for you, they use you up and throw you out.

But back to today’s nonsense, Cliff talks like Batty, obtuse, needlessly wordy, never getting to the point. The uninformed millennials who go to BuddyBlog (sorry Batty, blogs are out of fashion these days) for their news are going to love this….just like they love reading FW.

Was the Author hearing a “Dun Dun Daa!” in his head when he wrote ‘but his creator Dashiell Hammett!” ? It’s the only explanation. And it’s stupid.
And by the by I did a bit of looking and during the Mid-forties (World War 2) Hammett was serving in the US Army in Aleutian Islands having enlisted at age 48 (he was also a veteran of World War 1 – and had TB a the time so he pulled some strings to get into the Army – don’t hear much about that happening yes?) So Hammett was about as far away from Butter’s life of excess as you can imagine when the murder took place, so how he even could have an opinion on this is a bit hard to take. Or even be interested to be honest knowing what I know about Hammett.
I tuned out for the whole earlier Cliff/Hammett arc – and i’m glad I did. I’m very fond of Hammett’s work – I re-read Red Harvest when I really have a down on humanity and to have the author drag him BACK into his weird nostalgia playpen is irritating to say the least.
And oh yes – in the book Hammett makes very clear that Spade is a complete bastard.

I still do not understand the time sequence. This Buttterfatty Arbruckle guy was a silent movie star? His heyday would have been the decade from 1915-1925, or thereabouts, right? By the 1940s he would have been a has-been. Has this been addressed at all, or are we just rolling with this glaring error?